HPC Newsletter 1702

HPC Newsletter 1702

Dear colleagues,

Welcome to the second (and last) Freiburg HPC newsletter in 2017. There should have been more newsletters this year! We apologise and promise that this will improve in 2018. The major news at the end of the year is that the bwForCluster NEMO has been upgraded: It now has 900 compute nodes, 0.75 Petabyte of parallel storage and more robust local SSD drives. Furthermore, since the last newsletter was published, we had our yearly NEMO user assembly in October and the meeting of the NEMO advisory board in December.

Next year's bwHPC Symposium will be hosted by Freiburg. A call for papers will be issued soon, please save the date: 24/25 September (to be confirmed).

We wish you a Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year

Your HPC team

Upcoming events and important dates

NEMO extension

In the second week of October, NEMO did get its final hardware extension – for the time being. The hardware extension consists of 152 new compute nodes, including 66 nodes of new shareholders. The new nodes have the exact same hardware specification as the original NEMO nodes. Since the inauguration in August 2016, we evaluated the idea of extending NEMO with Xeon Phi processors. However, given the feedback from our communities, the NEMO advisory board and the results of our own tests, we concluded that a conventional extension was the better and preferred alternative. In retrospect, this turned out to be a good decision, since Intel cancelled the successor to the Xeon Phi just a few days ago.

The upgraded NEMO has a total of 900 compute nodes, 18000 cores and 115 Terabyte total working memory. The parallel BeeGFS storage has been increased by 33% to offer 0,75 Petabyte. (Read more)

bwHPC Symposium 2018 in Freiburg

The bwHPC Symposium in Baden-Württemberg is a yearly HPC conference. It brings together scientists, users and operators of the bwHPC research infrastructures to present ongoing activities and exchange concepts and ideas.

The bwHPC Symposium is organized in a round-robin fashion by the bwHPC project partners. In 2018, it will be Freiburg's turn to host the bwHPC symposium. To this end, we are are looking for contributions in the form of talks, papers and posters. Proceedings will be available in printed and online form.

Contributions to the bwHPC Symposium should cover scientific topics researched with the aid of the bwHPC clusters in Baden-Württemberg. Additionally, contributions on technical, administrative or organizational challenges related to large scale HPC operations will be accepted.